Racing Home

Daddy was at church for most of the day, but he raced home after service JUST IN TIME to say goodnight to Madison. Plus, we got to do a nighttime story together. What a pleasant surprise! Some of our story times have been using the TAG pen system, which is simply amazing technology. I may have explained this before, but a pen is applied to pages, and the pen will actually read the words it is touching - or describe a picture it is resting on. This may lend itself to a Madison's Book Club entry, huh?

MADISON'S BOOK CLUB

Today's entry is "Tiana's New Dream." Madison has about five of these Tag books so far, but Mommy and Daddy have been collecting a few on the side for the upcoming holiday season. These are great books to sit with your child and read - the pen reads the words individually, or there's an option where the pen will read entire pages and tell you when to turn each page at the sound of the chimes. Okay, so they aren't chimes - but that's what I had growing up. I vividly remember "Peter Pan" on a small turntable, and remember turning each page at the sound of the chimes. Now, we can relive these precious moments with a similar technology - minus the turntable. There are small games on the pages that teach instruments, culture and other things related to the overall story. The illustrations are great, and familiar as well. Madison has grown to like Princess Tiana quite a bit.

Here's a plug for the Leapfrog Tag people. The pen wasn't working. Okay, so that wasn't the "plug" part. Here's the plug: I wrote an email to the company, asking for advice on how to get it to work again. The problem was that it wasn't reading some of the pages. Here's the shocker: they actually responded very quickly, and responded accurately. I was told I had to delete everything off the pen and load it all back again. That fixed the problem, but the big deal to me is that they actually wrote back, and wrote back quickly. Isn't that strange? Actual helpful customer service can be shocking sometimes, can't it?